Rubenerd

Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam…

For a long time in this weblog's formative years I used to post some of the more funny, interesting or ridiculous spam messages I got either here, in email or from carrier pigeons shoved through my window. I figured I was getting all this material all the time, why not use it for something?

Anyway after an extended period of time where I received nothing but the usual penis enlarging advice, fake watches and bogus lotteries, I received a real gem (pun intended) in my comment moderation queue. It's… 1703 words long!

If I posted the entire message it would easily triple the length of this page (and it's already long enough as it is) so just to give you an idea here's a brief snippet:

Jewelry critical adornments frayed for adorn or utility, to manifest disgusting or profusion, or to go agreat with superstitious form toll or model Its use antecurrents clothing, and it has been made of a discrepancy of materials including berries, nuts, seeds, perforated stones, feathers, tresses, teeth, bone, upons, ivory, and metals. Although bronze and y be suffering with been toughened by rude peoples and in current handwrought jewelry, gold has commonly been the preferred metal. Jewelry has been decorated by cameo, embossing, etching, and filigree, and by employment of enamel, mosaic, gems , semiloved stones, and wo bestow make an exhibit a rare planesmanship. Archaic existance the jewelry is in general al, most colorful, and displays lotus cream and scarab motifs. Beads were in use accustomed to extensively, as in coarse collars, and were again second-hand for bartegive someone a buzz. Armlets and anklets were also tattered. There was a renewal of fervor for handwrought pieces dugang the trickery resuscitation of the 1960s in the opinion States. Other information about jewerly: (URLs removed)

Obviously by padding their spam URLs with natural language, they're attempting to bypass spam filters. Still, I didn't know that metals were toughened by rude peoples. Is that anything like Rude… box?

If it is, I'd rather not have anything to do with it!

My current dangerous musical obsession from Whole Wheat Radio is The Renovators! From their artist page:

Need a change of view? Call The Renovators! Adjustments to the spirit? Installments of humor? Try The Renovators!! A new attic or front porch? RENOVATORS!!!! They have the tools. They know the styles.

The Berger Brothers, Ted Hemberger on drums and Al Hemberger on bass and vocals, have made a name for themselves recording and playing throughout the Northeast.

Get renovated!

They have an official website, and their music is available from CDBaby.

The song that started this obsession is the hilarious, upbeat and fun song I Don't Ski off the album Rhythm and Blueprints.

I don’t ski

I’ve got a bad knee
Please, let me be
Don’t wanna ski
I don’t ski

But, that’s just me
You may disagree
Do you want to ski? Feel free
I don’t ski

Pardon me
I’d rather go climb a tree
Or stay at home, And have tea
I don’t ski

I don’t chickadee,
It’s too bourgeoisie
I have no pedigree, I’m no VIP
I don’t ski

I hereby decree
So, get away from me
And MYOB
Because I don’t ski

Nor on snow, lake or sea
Not 1, 2 or 3
Tell the powers that be
I’ll be in my MPV
I’m heading to Miami

What ever happened to the different images that Dave Winer would put on the top of Scripting News each year? Check out his archive for 2004 for example, then look at his current site. It looked so much better before!

While I was waiting for my latest project to compile, I was idly looking around Google Earth when I noticed an image of something familiar docked in Sydney!

As at turns out, the Wikipedia page on the QE2 even has a photo taken around that time, by User:Merbabu:

On February 20, 2007, the QE2, while on her annual world cruise, met her running mate and successor flagship QM2 (herself on her maiden world cruise) in Sydney Harbour, Australia. This was the first time two Cunard Queens had been together in Sydney since the original Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth served as troop ships in 1941.

Wikipedia article on RMS Queen Elizabeth 2

For those who follow the developments over on Whole Wheat Radio, the queen of the airwaves Esther Golton has just arrived back from her latest musical tour!

I know I speak for all the wheaties, wheatheads and wheatypeoples when I say it's good to have you back, and we're all looking forward to hearing your voice again from time to time on the morning shows with Jim. Cheers from Singapore!

If you don't know about Whole Wheat Radio, it's an online radio station produced in Talkeetna Alaska, in the States. They play only independent music, and have a thriving listener community which I'm proud to be a part of. You can rate songs you hear, you can edit their wiki pages and if you listen in for long enough you might hear Jim and Esther speaking live :).

We all readily admit that KDE is the greatest desktop environment ever developed for BSD, Linux, Solaris and other Unix-like operating systems, but that's not to say it can be improved by, or complimented with, other software.

ASIDE: Some people may not agree with my statement that KDE is the greatest desktop environment ever developed for Unix-like operating systems. I readily admit that Xfce is also very nice, especially when you’re using lots of GTK+ applications.

If you’re a GNOME person, well I guess we can’t all be perfect ;-)

Case in point, the Openbox window manager. Window managers draw the widgets, title bars, resize handles and other elements onto application windows. Desktop environments such as KDE, GNOME or Xfce bundle their own window managers along with software developed specifically for their environments, such as Konqueror for KDE.

Despite this bundling, it it is possible to replace the default window manager with one that you choose. You may do this to reduce memory usage, change functionality, or even just for a different visual style.

Openbox running in KDE (with Amarok listening to Whole Wheat Radio!)

To use Openbox instead of Kwin in KDE on a FreeBSD (or similarly configured) machine:

1. Update your ports tree, then
   cd /usr/ports/x11-wm/openbox/ && make install clean.
   Alternatively, just install the package with pkg_add -rv openbox
2. Open the .xinitrc config file in your home directory
3. Comment out # exec startkde (add a pound sign / hash)
4. Add exec openbox-kde-session

For NetBSD, you'll want to update pkgsrc then /usr/pkgsrc/wm/openbox/ && make install clean clean-depends instead in step 1.

To make it easier to change visual themes, the layout of the widgets and so forth, you might also want to install the ObConf tool which is also available in FreeBSD Ports and in NetBSD's pkgsrc.

Reading through Truemors (one of my favourite interesting news aggregator sites) this afternoon I came across a headline for a a BBC news report which claims that religious people lead happier lives. As a therefore "desperately unhappy atheist :D" I decided to check it out.

Truemors:
Believing in God Makes You Happier

Are you happy? If so, the chances are you probably believe in God. New research is now proving what many have known for centuries and that is, belief in God, leads to a more contented life. Believers have a sense of meaningful purpose in their lives, which allows them to go through difficult times with ease. However, believing in God is one thing and experiencing God is another. Then again, there are those who think that organized religion damages people, after all remember religion is man made, but God isn’t.

And my quickie response:

The fact that religion has a consoling effect on people still does nothing to prove whether it’s true or not. A more interesting question to explore should be: what is is about the human mind that requires the belief in myths or holding faith without evidence to be happy? Is there a psychological reason? Is it just pack mentality and a sense of belonging? I don’t think any of us fully know the answer yet.

For what it’s worth: people who drink excessively and smoke marijuana report greater happiness during their binges… does that therefore make them healthy and their activities should therefore be emulated? Are non drinkers and non smokers therefore less happy?

My 2 cents.

I just genuinely feel concern when I see people attempting to justify an activity on the basis that it makes people feel good. It's unethical and the potential for it to be used against innocent people is too high.

Another example of this would be in a hospital setting: would you want your doctor to lie about a potentially life threatening condition on the basis that it would make you feel better? Is the fact that it's untrue less of a concern then?

Pretty scary stuff. I'm off for a coffee.

A sign of things to come? Consider all these articles which were published within an hour of each other this afternoon Singapore time:

Sydney Morning Herald Video: Chinese Flag Burned

Tibet supporters took to the streets this morning to protest against China’s treatment of Tibet.. (00:01:18)

ABC Australia News:
EU Parliament head urges political boycott of Olympics

The President of the European Parliament has urged politicians to consider boycotting the Beijing Olympic Games to protest against China’s crackdown on demonstrations in Tibet.

Reuters:
China says Tibet rioters trying to wreck Olympics

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao accused the Dalai Lama of orchestrating riots in Tibet in which dozens may have died and said his followers were trying to “incite sabotage” of Beijing’s August Olympic Games.

ABC Australia News:
Taiwan’s presidential favourite considers Olympics boycott

Taiwan’s presidential election front-runner says that if elected, he may bar the country’s athletes from the Olympic Games if China continues to crack down in Tibet.

I'll certainly not be watching the 2008 Olympics. That's not to say I've ever watched any of the other Olympic games in the past… and not because they're dull and uninteresting. Is uninteresting a word?

For my university studies and to keep up to date with what's happening in the Linux world (given I'm a FreeBSD guy mostly) I decided to dual boot my new desktop machine with Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 Etch. In the past I'd always used Slackware to fill this role, but I figured I'd just try something new.

ASIDE: "Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 Etch" just doesn’t roll off the tongue as well as "Slackware Linux 12" or "FreeBSD 7.0 Release". A ridiculously pointless observation, but one that I believe deserves recognition. And it would look just fab printed on a shirt.

Within a few minutes of starting the initial install, I got the following error:

No common CD-ROM drive was detected? Are they serious?

Using the exact same optical drive I've been able to install the latest versions of FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and Slackware Linux, not to mention a creaky old version of Windows 2000 and even IBM OS/2 Warp! And yet Debian GNU/Linux cannot even detect the drive after the initial boot phase?

I took it to be a sign to keep using Slackware for my Linux partitions. It's a shame, I was looking forward to seeing why people seem to love apt-get so much; I guess it's back to my FreeBSD desktop with the ports collection, and Slackware Linux with pkgsrc. Not that I'm complaining, it's still my favourite distribution!

So, I was doing a Google search to compare Windows anti-virus tools, and across this site called LockerGnome. Aside from being a site for what I can only assume are incacerated mythical creatures, I now know I’m a crook.

You have been blocked from entering this site.

Huh.

You have attempted an Authors Table attack on this site.

*BUZZER* Sorry, you lucked out. Your consolation prize is a free course on security fundamentals from the University of Wikipedia.

All of the following information has been gathered to assist the webmaster should this need to be report [sic] to local or federal [sic] officers.

Okay, I’m starting to see the issue. LockerGnome has such flagrant disregard for their users, they’ve emplyed the use of a crappy security suite written by people who can’t even write proper English. Nice job, guys.

The good news is I’ll never see this again, because it’ll now be on my block list. Good riddance.